Cajoling, Drugging and More as Rebels Try to Draw Defectors

Syrian rebels listened to their commander before leaving for fighting in Aleppo in August.Credit
Bryan Denton for The New York Times

ANTAKYA, Turkey — For months, the disparate militias known as the Free Syrian Army relied on defections from the Syrian military to lead a credible if halting challenge to the government of President Bashar al-Assad. Every day seemed to bring word of new recruits. Soldiers fled in packs, or officers stole across a border, lifting the rebels’ morale while swelling their ranks.

But now opposition commanders say defections have slowed to a trickle. Some commanders have given up trying to entice defectors, and others have resorted to more desperate measures: cajoling, duping, threatening and even drugging and kidnapping military men to get them to change sides, or at least stay out of the fight. Without defections, they say, the opposition cannot hope to grow, never mind prevail.

“We use means only used by the devil,” said Ahmed Qunatri, a rebel commander in northern Syria who defected from the Republican Guard.

As Syria’s fighting burns into its 19th month, Mr. Assad’s forces have moved effectively to cut off what amounts to the armed rebellion’s most significant resource: soldiers with training and weapons who change sides. In a shift in strategy, the government has preferred to attack towns and neighborhoods from a distance using artillery and air power, preserving its resources and distancing its soldiers from rebel fighters — and from the public, including friends and neighbors, who might encourage defections.

Some rebel commanders now fret that all the soldiers who were inclined to defect already have. The rest remain loyal to the government, or are terrified of betraying it. Others are just suspicious of an armed movement that has found extremists among its ranks. A suicide attack in Aleppo on Wednesday that killed more than 40 people and devastated a government-held district drew widespread anger. Aware of just how much the violence is undermining popular support for the uprising, some rebel groups immediately tried to blame the government for staging the bombing. The government blamed the rebels. By nightfall, Jabhet al-Nusra, an insurgent group affiliated with Al Qaeda, claimed responsibility for the suicide bombings.

Col. Qassem Sa’adeddine, the head of the rebel military council for Homs, said in an interview in Turkey that the government’s close watch, especially at checkpoints, meant “communicating with officers has become much harder.” The colonel said it had also become more difficult to protect the families of defectors — for example, safe houses were harder to come by in neighborhoods depopulated by the government. “The officers are more hesitant these days,” he said. More and more, he said, the rebels used force.

“We arrest them and give them a chance to defect,” he said. “Some are convinced after a week, so they are welcomed.” Those who remained unconvinced — loyal to the government — were imprisoned, he said, and would face a “trial.”

Some of the methods used by the rebels reflected a cunning forged in necessity, but also an ability, at times, for brutality. Several times in recent months, rebel fighting groups — making no effort to persuade their enemies — have been accused of summarily executing captured soldiers. Last week, rebel fighters claimed credit for bombing a school they said was used as a military base. “The fewer the defectors, the less the opposition strives to attract soldiers rather than just fight them,” said Peter Harling, an expert on Syria with the International Crisis Group. “And the harsher armed groups treat the enemy, the fewer will change sides. It’s a self-reinforcing dynamic.”

Several commanders said they were still trying to persuade. Mr. Qunatri, the rebel commander, said in an interview here in Antakya that he preferred sending innocent-seeming emissaries to soldiers at military checkpoints. A 12-year-old boy, for example, helped turn one soldier, teasing him mercilessly until he relented. “Dude, why don’t you defect,” the boy would scold, repeatedly, as if the heavily guarded checkpoint was a schoolyard.

Another rebel officer, who uses the nom de guerre Abu Ali, sent a barber, Walid, who made friends with the soldiers by offering haircuts or doing laundry. “They want to defect,” Abu Ali said. “They don’t know how, or who can help.”

Another rebel commander who was a merchant before the war said he once sent a shepherd, who wandered by checkpoints and lent a sympathetic ear to the soldiers. “It helps if the soldiers were shepherds as well,” the commander said. “Nostalgia.”

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Another of the former merchant’s operatives, a food delivery man, identified six recruits, but the checkpoint they guarded was too well secured for them to leave: there was no way past the officers. “We thought of sending sleeping pills,” the commander said. The recruits spiked the water and the tea. “Thirty-eight soldiers fell asleep,” said a soldier named Shadi, one of those who defected that day. Rebel seized the sleeping soldiers along with their weapons. Some willingly flipped and others were made to promise they would not return to the fight, he said. “Two of the 38 returned to the army,” he said.

Though the rebels claim to have attracted thousands of recruits, there is little evidence the defections have slowed the Syrian Army. Many rebels say they are still waiting for a pivotal moment, for instance, when a brigade changes sides. Until that happens, they say, they are squeezing the army of every last dissenter against increasing odds.

An officer from Damascus said rebels called him for 16 months, without ever giving their names, first peppering him with friendly requests, before telling him he would be killed if he did not desert. To drive home the point, sometimes, they called from dead soldiers’ cellphones. “I finally defected, but I was so scared I didn’t trust my own wife,” said the officer.

A few weeks ago, three Syrian border guards decided to flee the country, forcing another soldier who had no desire to defect with them at gunpoint, fearing he would thwart their escape. “It was very confusing,” the soldier said in a phone interview from a country neighboring Syria on Friday. “If I stayed, the officers would blame me and I would surely face the death penalty. If I refused, my colleagues might kill me.”

After they had crossed the border, the defectors told the soldier he was free. “But where to go?” the soldier said. “I’m stuck with no way to go back. I’m already involved.” Since his exile started, he had started to sympathize with the rebels, he said.

Such tactics have angered some antigovernment activists, who worry that they alienate supporters of the uprising. One activist, who requested anonymity for fear of angering the Free Syrian Army, cited a recent case that he said was part of a worrying trend: an officer from the coastal city of Latakia was kidnapped, thrown in the trunk of a car and told he was defecting or he would be killed.

But faced with the government’s cruelty, many defectors said they needed no convincing: they were haunted, they said, by innocent victims and the cities they helped destroy. They spoke with pride about protecting demonstrations and defending their homes.

As the uprising has transformed into something more ambiguous — a struggle against a dictator but also a war scarred by sectarianism and foreign meddling — allegiances have become more contested. This week, in a jarring turn for the rebels, a man claiming to be a former insurgent commander appeared at an opposition conference in Damascus and said he was defecting back to the government.

“The solution in Syria does not lie in the use of weapons or violence or sabotage and explosions or the killing of innocents,” the commander, Col. Khaled Abdel-Rahman al-Zamel, said at the opposition meeting in Damascus. A spokesman for the Free Syrian Army asserted that the reversal was a ruse: the government had arrested the colonel back in March. “He is our colleague and our friend,” the spokesman said.

Hania Mourtada contributed reporting from Beirut, Lebanon.

A version of this article appears in print on October 4, 2012, on Page A14 of the New York edition with the headline: Cajoling, Drugging And More as Rebels Try to Draw Defectors. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe